Making your users feel special can happen through several means – providing what the consumers are looking for at the onset should be the most obvious starting point. Users come to our websites primarily through 2 channels, either promotions (
pull), or user-driven search (
push). Each brings in targeted users interested in your product or service and presents an opportunity to consummate and nurture the relationship.
However, often we fail to achieve the goals of our promotions strategies and/or returns on our marketing dollars because our “store front” did not appeal to the user need/want. Simply stated we probably did not do good job of engaging the user at the onset and then lost a further opportunity to up-sell our products and services. Differentiated experience is a must for the above pull vs. push strategies. However, what’s more important is to identify and measure the right metrics, such that our engagement and conversion goals are adequately represented and achieved.
When planning a PULL campaign, focus on the landing page experience that is clear and direct. For instance; if the users clicked on a story, make sure they see that story front and center on the page; if the users clicked on a 25% off offer, make sure it is prominently displayed on the page. Give the users what they want first, and if we have good knowledge of their behavior and usage pattern, we may show other BUT relevant up-sell opportunities – the idea is to let the user feel in control of the experience and not vice-versa. Omniture
click-map can show the engagement with modules on your page – typically only 20% of these drive traffic to other sections of your site and hence are useful, the rest are clutter and annoying – get rid of the non-performers. The
page view depth should not be high, since it indicates user was lost, or the offer was buried deep in the experience – not a good thing!
In a PUSH campaign, the dynamic is slightly different, in that, we know the user is searching, but is not 100% sure of what they will find, so they are more open to suggestions and up-sell opportunities. In this case, search page is ok to show plenty of relevant results, yet the focus should be user need. Recommendation engines are great for these pages and up-sell opportunities abound, provided they are relevant.
Click-map on these pages usually shows more spread than that on campaign pages, BUT relevance becomes the key in driving conversion.
Clicks on Sponsored Links and lead generation from the search pages provide good insight into the user response behavior and need to be monitored closely for optimization. Higher
page view depth may actually be a good thing; depending on how specific is the user search term(s).
